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Saturday, June 5, 2010

Tropical storms

Hello!

This week has been quite interesting. I am getting use to the city life. It feels like I am in a different country. In Chalchuapa it was hard to find members who had DVD players and here it is a given that everyone has a DVD player. That is a small difference but I am coming to realize that some people in El Salvador actually do have money. Who would have thought. Right now we don´t really have many investigators and we don´t have any baptism dates. But we found a family that we are working hard with. We found them on Sunday last week and we have visited them everyday. The first day none of the kids wanted to listen to us but we ended with a game and then the 13 year old boy said ¨Can you come tomorrow?¨ So we have a lot of hope for them because the dad is praying and reading in the Book of Mormon. They are named Familia Escobar. So the goal of us in this area is divide the ward and if we can divide the ward, the stake can be divided so pretty much everything is up to us. I feel like a super hero here to save the day. But, really it will be hard. It is kind of hard to work in a religious country because everyone thinks that everything is good and we will have great lessons and the people will say things like ¨Yes, I know that Joseph Smith was a prophet.¨ And then we get all excited and we say come to church with us and get baptized and then they say ¨No, I am happy at my church and it is all the same God.¨ We get a lot of that. People will listen to us but they don´t really want to listen to what we have to say.

So this week started with a rain storm. The people said it was a tropical storm and that the weather wasn´t that normal. It rained all day for about 3 days. It rained all of Saturday and Sunday and Monday. The attendance is supposedly usually around 180 but this week a wopping 65 people came to church. Apparently the El Salvadorean government told the whole country that they should stay in their houses. I thought that the rain would be a great excuse for people to let us in their house but that is not the case here in the city. On Monday we were absolutely soaking wet and we knocked on the door of a less active member and she just screamed at us from inside the house that she couldn´t let us in the house because we were wet. We figured that it didn´t really matter anyway because our clothes were already saturated with water. We couldn´t get any more wet. I think it is fun to work in the rain. It makes me feel like I am really ¨suffering¨ on the mission. But secretly I enjoy it. But because of all the rain it has been kind of cold this last week and I am enjoying the lack of sweat.

So I told you that we are working in this ward with other Hermanas. This week they had a little scare. They contacted a man in their area and he said some bad things to them and said that he knew exactly what houses they visited in the area. So, they told President the story. The next day President said we had cambios (transfers) and that we were going to another area called Merliot. So we packed up all our stuff and we were ready to go and then President called and said that we were going to stay. President Duarte (our stake president) called and told President (of the mission) that he wanted us to stay in our area. So we stayed. This is just fine for me because I feel perfectly safe in the area. So we are staying where we are.

Another adventure that we are still having is that our house hasn´t gotten water for one week. We started off bathing in purified water that we had to drink but we quickly ran out of that and so we had to borrow a whole bunch of water from our house owners. We don´t know when we will get water but some people have told us that a pipe broke during the tropical storm and so a whole bunch of people are out of water. So we are crossing our fingers that we will get water soon so that we can have a real bath.

The life in the city is way different. It is crazy because they even have malls here and we buy our food in a place that is just like Walmart. Ahh, the luxuries of city life. But don´t worry because I am still working. I talked to President a little bit (he still scares me). Before he said that a new nurse wouldn´t come till January but he said that someone told him that they were sending a nurse in August. I am hoping that a nurse comes in August because I am slowly learning that I really don´t know anything about nursing. I would be just fine with sending my companion home in August and then training the new nurse and have her tell me what medicines people needed. I would be good at that. I wouldn´t be good at being on my own.

Well, even though I am with a gringa again, I still feel like my Spanish is improving because people can´t really understand my companion very much and so I have to talk a lot more and translate for them. It is kind of funny.

We are working hard and I hope that everyone is having a good time in the States.